'PUBG' moves beyond battle royale with War Mode

The PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds team is now clearer about their plans to add game modes beyond the signature battle royale and zombie games. The developer has revealed that it's experimenting with a War Mode that behaves more like the conventional deathmatches in other games rather than PUBG's last-one-standing formula. You get a submachine gun right off the bat, and it's not over when you die -- teams keep respawning until one of them reaches 80 points through a combination of kills, knockdowns and revives. It shouldn't be as frustrating for rookies (who may die seconds into a battle royale if they're not careful), and could be faster-paced given that players won't have to scramble for guns to start fighting.

War Mode is only available for custom servers (which can only be created by PUBG Partners on Windows PCs at the moment), but there are plans to bring it to the public through Events.

As for Xbox One players? There's some news for you, too. PlayerUnknown himself (aka Brendan Greene) and Microsoft's Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb have confirmed that the Xbox One version of PUBG will finally get the game's second map, Miramar, in May. This won't necessarily be good news to everyone (critics have argued that Miramar's expansive desert landscape leads to too many sniper battles), but it's good news if you've grown bored of playing on Erangel and wish you had the variety of your Windows counterparts. Not that the parity will last for long when the smaller Savage map is right around the corner.